1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to technology for managing documents, images, and other types of information.
2. Description of Related Art
Information management systems that are known by names such as content management systems (CMS), document management systems (DMS), and digital asset management (DAM) systems are used by corporations and other organizations for managing massive amounts of information including documents and images. One reason that such information management systems have attracted attention is that the need to efficiently manage a flood of information in corporations has become acute. Another major factor is the emphasis on sharing information within a corporation and between companies in a corporate group.
Civil litigation in the United States, for example, involves a process called “discovery,” a system that requires documents that are required as evidence to be provided to the other party. To comply with this system of discovery, many law firms in the United States have introduced information management systems for handling different types of documents as easily searchable digital data.
The information that is handled by an organization and the purposes for which the information is managed vary widely between organizations, and information management systems are therefore ideally built to the particular specifications of the individual organization. Such custom-built management systems are, however, expensive to develop. Therefore, while large corporations have steadily introduced such information management systems, many small and medium-size corporations have yet to deploy such information management systems. Because it is difficult for small and medium-size corporations to provide the human resources and new dedicated facilities required to build such systems, building a system with the lowest possible overhead is desirable. Japanese Patent Publication JP 2001-222525, for example, teaches a method of managing confidential documents for different corporations on a single server system that is managed by a third-party contractor that contracts individually with each of the corporations.